A testimony of sexuality in times of violence, this journey into the intimate language of the male body is freighted with danger and desire and expressed through a dark eroticism reminiscent of Garcia Lorca and Cavafy.
"Breads That Hunger"
I make love to a man with a button fetish. Correction: a man makes love to my shirt. He yanks each piece of plastic with his teeth and swallows it, then inserts the cusp of his tongue into the buttonhole. I slip out of the sleeves and off the bed and he scarcely notices. Later, he comes looking for me; my shirt slumped across his shoulder. It looks as if I have shed my skin-the fantasy of meeting the train on the rusty tracks comes to life. Buttonless, I have been stripped of everything that holds me together. He tells me he can replace the shirt. I tell him he can keep me.
Rigoberto Gonzalez is the author of four books, So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water Until It Breaks-a 1998 National Poetry Series selection-two bilingual children's books, and a novel, Crossing Vines (2003), which was a ForeWord Magazine Fiction Book of the Year. Gonzalez is a Guggenheim Fellow and a member of PEN and the National Book Critics Circle. He is an associate professor of English and Latino studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a contributing editor to Poets & Writers magazine.
